A little while ago I wrote post about why black Americans were slow in warming up to Barak Obama, and in it I posited that the reason was that Barak was not viewed as “black like me.” He had not gone through the same struggles that many blacks had gone through, that he was just so different from most blacks that he would have a hard time connecting with them. Since that time the worm has truly turned, and now I find myself trying to figure out why there is this sudden embrace of Obama by much of the black voting populace. Some think it is simply about his race, some think it is just the same old politics as usual, and there are I am certain other theories floating around that may or may not shed led on the subject. But what follows is my particular take on the issue.

I was in my African American history seminar class the other day, and we were having a class discussion about how blacks treat one another, how we relate to one another, and how we see each other. One of my young classmates had the view that much of what we see in the black community is a manifestation of how the rest of the world views us; that we are in essence victims of the perceptions of us that others have created. I countered that the problem is not how others see us, but how we see ourselves; I felt that many of the images that we say bother us are our own creation, so we are victims of ourselves. Thinking a little more about it, we were both right in sense and it is in the melding of those ideas that I see the traction that Obama has been able to gain in the black community, even after first struggling to gain traction with “his” constituents.

The embrace of Barak Obama all comes back not to the fact that he is simply black, but because he is what blacks want people to see when they look at us. His image, politics aside, is the image that blacks want to be associated with all of us, as opposed to the dominant images of blacks in the media. So many times the images associated with blacks is of the inner city single mother, the gangbanger on the corner, or of the “iced out” rap star. These are all negative images, and many blacks want nothing more than to not be associated with these images, as we know how negative they are. We know that the world is watching and judging all of us on the basis of those images.

Politically, the images that people have of blacks in this country by and large are dominated by people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, and Charles Rangel. All of these people are your archetypical hardcore “Black Left” Democrats, whose very stock in trade is to garner power by appealing to what Shelby Steele so correctly called “white guilt.” Every slight is a reason to cry racism, every plan in opposition to them is a conspiracy against blacks, and every policy debate is a reason to launch another scathing attack on “institutional racism.” As much as we would like to see ourselves in the images of people like JC Watts, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, or Harold Ford, we have come to realize that since the squeaky wheel gets the media grease, the image of blacks in the political realm that are going to be publicized will not be the articulate manner of a Harold Ford, but the wild eyed conspiracy mongering of a Maxine Waters.

Into this political scene then steps one Barak Hussein Obama and he is exactly what many have been waiting for. He is tall, good looking, accomplished, educated, successful, polished, and as slick as black ice. He carries himself with pride, without looking haughty; he speaks like an Ivy League graduate, yet he retains some of the street patois that identifies him as “one of us”; he has “made it” in this world that seems like it is stacked against our success, yet he has never stopped being “down”, as the slang puts it. His is the image that we all want for the world to see and associate with black Americans, that of a man that is all of the things that whites admire and is still at home among the “regular” black folks.

And that is what concerns me about this situation, and not so much Obama’s decidedly left of center, boilerplate Democratic politics. It is the fact that we, as blacks continue to allow ourselves to be defined by what white people think of us; we internalize their views of us and spend so much of our time attempting to either live up to or escape those views that we barely are able to define ourselves. We are constantly wearing a mask to project to others what we think they want us to be and in so doing we lose sight of who we are. We allow ourselves to be seen as members of a group, whose image is wrapped up in how white people perceive one member of our race, and if that member is getting a negative reaction we all feel as if we are being viewed in a negative light. Until we are able to honestly define ourselves as individuals, until we are able to truly accept the fact that our black “brothers” are not wrong to hold unpopular opinions, and until we are able to divorce our ideas of “blackness” from the embrace of a defined set of opinions, mores, and political views we will remain stuck in our current rut.

We have the power to become Americans just like any other people, regardless of our skin color. But until we embrace those opportunities and divorce ourselves from the compulsion to group identify instead of behaving as true individuals, we are always going to be a people searching for just the right image, and just the right leader. We have to understand that we are too diverse to need a single leader, and that we are too diverse to allow ourselves to be defined by any single image. We have among us the poor, the rich, the gangbanger and the graduate; our race contains all of these things…but we have to be strong enough not to allow any one of those things to define all of us.

And as much as it may pain some to hear it, that includes rejecting the image of Obama as the image of all black Americans. His story can be an inspiration, and he can be used as a role model for people to aspire to be like. But he is no more the singular image of black Americans than I am, and we have to be strong enough to say so.

Even if it hurts.